1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention provide a system and a method for optimizing usage of resources of a contact center for improving efficiency. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention provide a system and a method for optimizing login of agents at communication managers in a large call center.
2. Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service inbound and outbound contacts from customers. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts.
Contact centers distribute contacts, whether inbound or outbound, for servicing to any suitable resource according to predefined criteria. In many existing systems, the criteria for servicing the contact from the moment the contact center becomes aware of the contact until the contact is connected to an agent are client or operator-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring. Currently, when a system controller of an automated call distribution (ACD) system detects an agent has become available to handle a contact, the controller identifies all predefined contact-handling queues for the agent, usually in some order of priority, and delivers to the agent the highest-priority, oldest contact that matches the agent's highest-priority queue. Generally, the only condition that results in a contact not being delivered to an available agent is where there are no contacts waiting to be handled.
The primary objective of contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency. Some single-pool contact centers treat the agents as a single pool of resources and views the callers as a single pool of contacts with various needs. Further, agents are typically associated with a specific communication manager (“CM”) and ACD. In a large contact centers, there are typically many communication managers to direct incoming calls to agents associated with them.
Before routing an incoming call, intelligent customer routing (ICR) polls various communication managers in order to determine a contact center for best service routing to which an incoming call should be routed. However, due to performance reasons, polling is ordinarily limited to a rate of not greater than about one second per poll. With some call management systems (CMS), the polling is limited to a rate of about once per three-second interval. For systems of the known art, if multiple agents on a given call manager finish their tasks between polling periods (e.g., 100 agents free up on a particular communication manager such as CM 3), the systems would direct next 100 calls to the specific call manager (i.e., CM 3) to be handled by the free agents. This scenario, also known as agent surplus, may result in a spike of incoming calls directed at a specific call manager.
In a large call center with a large number of call managers (e.g., some systems may have seventeen CMs), traffic calculations assume that calls are evenly distributed among the plurality of ‘CMs’, smoothing the influx of incoming calls for any given call manager. During an agent surplus scenario as discussed above, all of the incoming calls are directed to a specific call manager, due to which, the specific call manager may get overwhelmed resulting in performance deterioration of the contact center. For large call centers, an agent surplus scenario may result in a greater rate of arrival of calls at any given call manager (i.e., greater than the average arrival of calls at each call manager), thereby putting burden on the particular call manager and resulting in performance deterioration of the contact center. When designing a large call center to accommodate spikes in call arrival rate at any given call manager, additional call managers need to be factored in to ensure proper operation under these spikes. The increased number of required call managers reduces the appeal of the single-pool system and adversely impact the competitiveness of such systems.
Conventionally, this problem has been solved by over-engineering capacity at all communication managers, but that also leads to inefficient usage of resource and higher costs. Further, in high traffic scenarios, overload protection may also result in customer calls being dropped.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that is capable of addressing above issues of controlling call traffic at a particular communication manager and further optimizing resources of the contact center in order to improve efficiency.